Oh my God. She killed Kevin.

There is no doubt that the cuts announced today display political courage on the part of the Prime Minister.
(ABC TV)

It took Julia Gillard about 30 seconds to read out today, in matter-of-fact tones, a list of her predecessor's pet projects that she has decided to put to the sword.

As the names of the fallen rang out, one by one (GreenStart! The Green Car Innovation Fund! The Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute!), they evoked brief, flickering recollections of a happier time, when the air was full of excited talk about transitioning to a low carbon economy, with maximised stakeholder engagement.

Presented by the floods with a budgetary crisis, the Prime Minister has decided to embark on an ambitious program of what, on the West Wing, would be called "Taking out the trash".

One PM's trash is another PM's treasure, of course, and there's no question about whose stuff is being chucked here.

Of all the expendable programs Ms Gillard selected for extinction, the vast majority were Kevin07's brainwaves and only one - the Cleaner Car Rebate Scheme - was a silly idea traceable directly to the PM herself.

The Cleaner Car Rebate Scheme, interred today into its early and unmarked grave, was announced during last year's election; it committed the Government to accepting and wrecking pre-1995 cars and furnishing their owners with $2,000 to spend on a Prius instead.

By year's end, the scheme had acquired a gentle stench so pervasive that Peter Garrett got in trouble in Parliament for the mere act of vocalising its common name - Cash for Clunkers.

Estimates of the unit price of carbon abatement offered by the scheme hovered at about the $400 per tonne mark; a prospect about as uncomfortable for the Government as the idea that Julia Gillard was a new PM with a part-time wrecker's yard.

For months, the Government has looked very much as though it was waiting for the opportunity to abandon this policy at a lonely bus stop; the floods provided just such an opportunity, and a lot more besides.

What happened at the National Press Club today amounted to the partial public dismantlement of Kevin Rudd's legacy, and in some of his most treasured policy areas too.

The National Rental Affordability Scheme - a prodigious national building scheme designed to serve Mr Rudd's stated aim of halving homelessness - took a $264 million haircut.

The rather grandly-named Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, which is not a Swiss-based cosmetics institute operated by Doctor Aldo Gucci but an entity designed to link Australian companies to those doing similar work on carbon capture overseas, has been snipped severely; a setback to the noble vision of Australia at the forefront of a global carbon economy that so occupied the dreams of the former PM.

A whole slew of demand-driven carbon abatement programs are to lose substantial skin; the Renewable Energy Bonus Scheme's Solar Hot Water Rebate scheme will be capped for a saving of $160 million, and some people still waiting for their solar panel rebates from the Solar Homes and Communities Plan will never receive them - $80 million.

Mr Rudd's dream of a vibrant Australian automobile industry was lubricated in late 2008 by the announcement of a $6.2 billion assistance plan; bigger than the industry itself expected, and to the deep horror of the Productivity Commission which had explicitly forbidden the PM to do any such thing.

All together, as far as I can tell from the documents, about $2 billion of the announced cuts were to Rudd schemes and programs.

There were other casualties, of course; Ms Gillard's old chums in the higher education sector will be consternated to find that she has killed off the Australian Learning and Teaching Fund (a Howard-era innovation), including the $50,000 annual teaching prize that bears her name.

Likewise, the Capital Development Pool (another Howard idea), which helps universities build and expand, is to be abolished entirely, saving $300 million.

There is no doubt that the cuts announced today display political courage on the part of the Prime Minister.

For one, they actively antagonise the Greens; the preliminary howl of shock and outrage from that quarter is enough to rather upset the notion that the Prime Minister governs this nation in unofficial coalition with Bob Brown.

The cuts also expose the PM to some extremely uncomfortable questions.

Her insistence that pricing carbon is the best and most economical way to reduce its production, for instance, does rather beg the inquiry about why she didn't venture that opinion back when Kevin Rudd was squirting around the cash for all these schemes and subsidies and industry assistance packages in the first place.

The question for Penny Wong - who spent two years designing these innovations as Climate Change Minister and then the last week or two, as Finance Minister, presiding over their controlled detonation - is sharper still, as you would expect.

But it takes a bit of nerve to sweep a broom like the PM has done today.